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Kathmandu Sunday January 07, 2001 Paush 23, 2057.
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Balkrishna Sama’s ‘Expression
after Death’
By Raju Chitrakar
Balkrishna Sama captures the images of after-death in the
following lines:
I become one with its colour.
Such is my condition,
Finer than the flying dust,
Thinner than vapour
More slender than the streaks of light
Softer than the air itself!
A drop of water there was,
It dropped into the lake and became the lake,
And I became the sky.
The stage after-death is a metaphorical state of realization
rather than a particular physical situation, and the expression is a stage of poetic
desire that the poet wants to think in non-material way. It is not an expression in a
literal sense but a desire merely to express.
"Expression after Death" is one of the most talked
about poems of Sama. The poet imagines himself to be dead and is consoling his lamenting
wife. He conceives death as a simple change and does not see it from a mundane
perspective. The poet creates a situation
which alters the definition of a particular existence: death
is something else for a dead. On the one hand, the speaker consoles his wife, and on the
other hand, the poem raises two interesting situations: conceiving death from a physical
perspective and conceiving it from an imaginary situation.
The death is an imaginary situation, it is a fantasy that
Sama creates. Despite the fact that there are traditional meanings related with soul,
spirituality and about transient mundane existence, Sama plays with the word death in his
poems. He is basically a playwright and he loves to create dramatic situations. The drama
in the poem is the "poet personae’s" conversation with his wife, who are in
two different planes. These two contrasting situations, that of the speaker and of the
addressee, present a state where the speaker is calm and controlled and the woman is all
loaded with feelings of separation, loss and pain of this world of appearance.
The privileged part of the speaker is to be in "a
knowing poetic spirit" where agonies vanish and one can look at the world from a
strange stage of freedom. To be "a knowing poetic spirit" is a state of writing
poetry and which seems to be an innocent job. He can easily detach himself from the
sufferings, from "a knowing mundane spirit," from the physical pangs, from the
burden of knowing pleasure and pain. He can simply write and disassociate himself from the
knowledge of the world to the innocence of not knowing all that is worldly.
He writes about death and poetry in "Fearlessness:"
I again say Death is nowhere,
Life is nowhere,
What is, is something different from Life and Death,
Something greater than joy-
And that is fearless-that is poetry-
That is the direct experience of Absolute Enlightenment,
The direct manifestation of "OM",
The inseparable merger with the Ultimate Truth,
The liberation from the vicious circle of Birth and Death!
To be "a knowing poetic spirit" is to be beyond
death, and ultimate truth beyond life and death, a state of fearlessness. This
fearlessness is that "knowing poetic spirit". It is a blessed mood that creates
poetry of after-death for the world of living. He has immense confidence in this poetic
spirit, he says in "Poetry and Painting:"
When I want a shapeful dream I write poetry,
And when I want a dreamlike shape I paint,
When I want you to speak to me I write poetry
And when I want you to smile with me I paint.
Sama mostly used blank verses (chanda bhanga kabita or gadya
kabita) in short and long poems. Along with Swarga ra Devata (Heaven and God) and in the
epic Chiso Chulo (Cold Oven) he has successfully used blank verse style. In western
literary tradition, the style is widely favoured by dramatists, though Nepali blank verse
style is slightly different.
The poet, playwright and artist, Sama was born in 1902 and
died in 1971. He was honoured with Prithvi Pragya Award and was appointed the
Vice-chancellor of the Royal Nepal Academy. Sama wrote poems in English, some of which he
translated himself.. Laxmi Prasad Devkota translated Sama’s "You are not
dead." The poem is a lamentation on the dead of the speaker’s beloved. These are
some opening lines from the poem:
The shapes of the clouds in the East,
Suffused with the first flush of sun-rise, are the silences and the smiles
Of your own heart alternately dancing.
You are not dead.
Death has been one of Sama’s favourite abodes as a
poetic stage of expression and hence in his poems, death is not used in the literal
connotations. Reading his poems is like sitting by the side of a calm lake, waiting for
the evening to play with the last rays of the sun.
(Essay on Nepali literature appears in the first week of
every month and is coordinated by Literary Association of Nepal)
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